Yesterday, I got my X-Surf 3cc Ethernet card I broke down and ordered for my Amiga 3000. There's some backstory about serial consoles, Sparcs, and the cluster, but it's not important. The 3000 was also packaged as a Unix machine, running a pretty standard port of SysV. It was the first Amiga standard with an MMU and SCSI. It'll also kick out 1280x resolution graphics at 2bpp. Commodore sold an Ethernet board for it along with Unix on tape.

The context I was talking about POE in was this: a program written to use it versus one written to do something else looks very different. This means that it's hard to switch styles. A lot of changes have to happen to a lot of the program.

Everything goes out of fashion eventually.

That was part of the point of evaluating how entrenched any abstraction will make you. Being entrenched by an abstraction is a mark against it.

Too much and leaky abstraction is another matter and I whipped on other things there.

Basically no mischief or craziness. Having DEFCON at a casino did to it exactly what I would have expected. No money pots to eat the cockroach, no naked fire jugglers, no getting thrown in the pool, no parties by the pool.

Bros outnumber the blackshirts now. They're talking loudly and proudly about how little they know and care.

I wrote this once and it didn't post (that often happens here, in various scenarios) or else it got deleted. Assuming the former. Here's a super short version of the same thing. The first go was much better. Dammit.

* College CS departments are owned by Microsoft and Sun. They use C# and Java out of consideration for strings-attached grant money.

I flew USAir. This was the airline that promised me a $200 flight voucher and gave me nothing. They announced on the way back that the stop in Phoenix was actually a plane change for the people going through to CA. The airlines started doing "stops" rather than layovers because people hated switching planes -- too often they wouldn't make their connection and they were twice as likely to have a canceled flight.

In a Perl 6 talk, pmichaud felt necessary to justify to the audience why something was a bit cryptic: he was running out of space on the line. dconway, from the back, commented "If I had a dollar for every time someone wrote unmaintainable code with that excuse...", prompting me to point out on IRC that putting lots of stuff on one line is an optimization technique in AtariBASIC. The moment I said that I realized (or remembered) that Perl has exactly the same problem: it does a linear tra

Simula introduced OO in the 60s. Smalltalk took it to its logical and pure extreme in the 80s. C++ brought it to systems programming and gave it the performance that only static optimized code can enjoy.

Really smart people wrote really smart code using really powerful, really futuristic features in C++... and created great big steaming piles of crap.

In Minnesota around '93, an ISP started offering unlimiting dialup. Through an arrangement with the state to make Internet more widely available than government offices and college campuses, they were to resell from the UMN.edu modem pool and the one T1 coming into the state to the general public. After my brother and I tag-teamed 24/7 for about two months, they changed their unlimited usage policy "due to the actions of one user".